In recent years, in automobiles and other applications, two or more dissimilar communication buses, each handling unique control information, are used. When there is a need to exchange information between one communication bus and another, a gateway device is provided through which the two buses, implemented with different communication methods, are interconnected.
When two communication buses are interconnected via a gateway device as described above, the amount of communication traffic on each communication bus increases because information on one communication bus is transmitted to the other communication bus and vice versa. To suppress such an increase in communication traffic, some prior art gateway devices employ techniques of information filtering using physical addresses or logical addresses, but in that case, information associated with the same address is all transferred to the other communication bus.
Accordingly, with such prior art gateway devices, if only part of information is needed on the communication bus at the receiving side, all information destined for its address is processed for gatewaying into the receiving communication bus. This increases the communication traffic since unnecessary portions of the information are also transferred.
Furthermore, in configurations where periodically occurring information is processed for gatewaying regardless of whether there occurs a change in its contents, the amount of communication traffic also increases because unnecessary information whose contents remain unchanged is also transferred when only information representing the latest change is needed on the receiving communication bus.